Too many IT leaders are ignorant. They are blinded by the allure of Power BI being "free". It's not. Why I don't use Power BI by Andy Kriebel

Earlier today I wrote about this great viz from Business Insider. In particular I really like the annotations.


I had a few minutes this morning so I decided to build a Tableau version. The first problem I ran into was getting the data in fiscal quarters. I couldn't find the data quickly, so I went with calendar quarter data that I found on Bare Figures. My data doesn't match the original above due to the calendaring, but that wasn't the point of the exercise. This was all about practice for me.

Essentially I wanted to replicate the viz with a more impactful title and some other minor formatting changes. Here's what I came up with. Click on the image for the interactive version.

Most people that have been using Tableau for years have become very familiar with right-click+dragging pills to bring up context menu (particularly for dates), plus lots of other keyboard shortcuts. The Mac OS works differently, so if you're considering switching to Tableau for Mac, here are some handy tips to keep in mind (via this response by Vijay Doshi on the Tableau Forums):

The Option+Left Click is necessary because Mac and windows handle the right-click event slightly differently.

On windows there are effectively two events:

1. On right-click press down, no menu is shown and you can then drag the pill around.
2. On right-click release, Tableau shows the "right-click menu".

On Mac, the convention is on right-click press down you see the context menu (try it in finder). Tableau cannot show both the context menu and drag. Thus, Tableau has to use a keyboard modifier.

Command+Drag will duplicate a field (i.e., copying the same field from/to a shelf from/to LOD). On Windows this is Control+Drag (Tableau could not keep it the same because on Mac Control+Left-click = context menu by convention).

Option+Drag will show you the aggregation options for the field.

One bug that I've reported is that when you Command+Drag to duplicate a field, you won't see the little + that you do on Windows that is a visual clue that you're duplicating the field.

Chart of the Day posted a chart yesterday that directly related to two of my recent post about how to effectively present pie charts:

1. Pie charts aren't always evil. A confession of a hypocrite.
2. Tableau Public: Pie Chart Alternatives

In each of these posts I walked through the different options other than pie charts for presenting data across time and compares parts-to-whole relationships.  Here’s the chart from COTD:

It’s pretty easy to see what they are doing here.  Basically they’re comparing market share across operating systems at two times last year.  The biggest problem with this chart is that it’s challenging to compare more than one slice at a time across the pies.  In other words, you can see that Windows share has gone down, but then when you look at Mac’s share, you will probably forget what the Windows change was.

I decided to practice what I preach and put my own recommendations to the test.  Here’s what I came up with:

With my version, I feel it’s much easier to see the market share change because that’s how I’m representing it in the top chart.  The purpose of the COTD blog post was to show the change in market share, so why not present the data as the change in market share? 

I supplemented the chart with a table in the event someone wants to know the exact values.  Notice that I set the values to one decimal place vs. two for COTD.  Two decimals is completely unnecessary precision.